Chronicle

It's found-footage o'clock again, and today's attempt to kick the genre up the arse features no city-destroying Godzilla-types or giant trolls being hunted through the forests of Norway, but telekinetic teenagers being annoying, anti-social and murderously violent, just like normal teenagers. Ugh, teenagers.

Look at them, happy-slapping pensioners and knife-criming each other.
What we need's a good war, etc.

What Chronicle does well is take the angry, confused teen movie to the next logical step, assuming the next logical step is giving them mysterious super-powers and using them to go postal on everyone and everything. It's the anti-Spider-Man: instead of immediately going out being all goody-goody and catching crooks and men dressed as goblins, Andrew Detmer - Chronicle's version of Peter Parker - uses his powers to be even more of a twat to everyone than they are to him, and who wouldn't? That teacher's pet Peter Parker, that's who. I bet he wouldn't do to spiders what Andrew does either.

What it also does well is convincingly show the characters learning to use their powers gradually throughout the film, before a balls-out final act that showcases the extent of their abilities and uses them to combine themes of friendship, revenge and the traumas of adolescence with explosions, collapsing buildings and flying buses.

A flying bus, yesterday

What Chronicle doesn't do so well at is being a found-footage film. The footage has improbably been stitched together from hundreds of different sources, crappy video cameras have suspiciously high-quality pictures and sound (if you can take a VHS camcorder into a rave and make out what people ten feet away are saying then you should sell that technology for ten zillion dollars), and a whole character is hauled into the plot with no other purpose but to be an extra camera operator. The aforementioned insane finale practically ditches the format completely, and it's only because the action's so good that you tend not to notice. The film doesn't really gain anything from the found-footage aspect, and if anything it pulls you out of the story when it breaks the rules, which is surely the exact opposite of its raison d'être, if I may be so twatty.

Anyway, the cast of largely-unknowns and the structure of the script are good enough to paper over most of the nonsense, and Chronicle is a tight, zippy blast of pubescent super-anti-heroism which you should definitely go and see this weekend to cheer you up after the disturbing but equally good unsettlathon that is Martha Marcy May Marlene.